The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen HawkingMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Narrated by Hawking himself and under four hours, this series of lectures is really the length of a single lecture. This is very accessible, popularly presented cosmology: The Big Bang, black holes, the direction of time. This last topic includes the interesting topic of imaginary time which Hawking popularized in his book The Universe in a Nutshell:
One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?
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